A Moscow restaurant got popped with a $13,700 (840,115 rubles) fine for placing a cannabis leaf on a beer menu. Yes, the long arm of Reefer Madness extends all the way to Russia.
According to a report in the Moscow Times, the prosecutor’s office punished the restaurant for “a graphic depiction of cannabis leaves, as well as a textual description of the said plant used in the preparation of the sold alcoholic product.” Advertising drugs, including “plants containing narcotics,” is illegal in Russia.
The offending product was Hanfblüte, a hemp-flavored Swiss beer that is distributed and sold (legally) all across Russia. Arkady Pogosov, the head of the company that owns the restaurant, said he felt trapped by contradictory regulations. “We’re hostages of the situation,” he said. The restaurant has a legal obligation “to inform the consumer about the contents of the products sold” on the one hand. But can’t use a well-understood icon to signify the hemp contained in the beer.
According to the Eastern Administrative District of the Prosecutor’s Office of Moscow:
“During the audit, it was revealed that the menu of the restaurant’s bar card, which is an advertising material intended for an indefinite circle of persons, contains a graphic image of hemp leaves, as well as a textual description of the said plant used in the preparation of realizable alcoholic beverages, namely, and flowers of cannabis (a plant of the genus Cannabis), information on which is included in the ‘List of plants containing narcotic or psychotropic substances or their precursors and subject to control in the Russian Federation uu’ and the free circulation of which is prohibited.
“This graphic and textual material contributed to the manifestation of interest and focused on the use of substances banned in the Russian Federation, and its content did not meet the requirements of the legislation on advertising.”
She’s worked at six brothels across Australia, in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth. At one of her former brothels, a worker was raped by a client. The staff at the house were unhelpful to police, but they eventually caught the man. She was also robbed by another working girl in a different brothel, but like the other, wouldn’t help her with security camera footage to track the thief down. Where she worked, drugs were always around, especially cocaine, which she was addicted to for a time. The stresses of brothel life led her to strike out on her own as an independent sex worker. “Anyone with their shit together will go private,” she writes.
And she does pretty well on her own, charging $550 for the first hour, $1050 for the next then $300 for each additional hour. An entire day with her will set you back $2,500, while two costs $5,000. She says she’s had between 1,100 and 1,200 sexual partners.
She doesn’t consider herself a “knockout,” but describes herself as a girl-next-door who’s won over the regulars.
“I’m pretty but I tend to get a few regulars because they like my personality. I’m opinionated, I take the piss a lot, I’m a bit of a shit-stirrer and I’m a straight shooter: they all seem to like this about me,” she wrote. “I also like learning, I’m interested by a lot of things. So if I see a client who’s a 60 y/o Cuban American engineer, I’m going to talk politics with him. If I see a client who’s 30 and a photographer, I’m going to ask him about his work and show genuine interest. I always find something to talk about with them.”
Most of her clients are businessmen over 40, who are usually married. They mainly stick to missionary and woman-on-top positions, and “maybe doggy if they have the energy.” But she has a few hard-rules if things get adventurous. She won’t do:
Incest role play
Water sports or mud sports
Most fetish-type stuff: “My specialty is GFE. If clients want to get whipped they’ll go to a dominatrix or a sex worker who specializes in fetish”
Two dudes at once “for safety reasons. If I’m alone with one dude I stand a chance of beating him in a fight should things get ugly. Two dudes, I have no chance. I’d like to get DP’d someday though”
Long bookings out of the city
Her personal sex life sounds very different from her profession. “Sometimes I find it easier to come at work than in my personal life because I feel less pressure. I don’t care whether the client thinks I’m faking it or not. I already have his cash at that point so an orgasm is just gravy. But with dudes from my personal life I put more pressure on myself. Sometimes I get self-conscious about how long it takes and it stresses me out.”
Americans who hold strong religious beliefs consume less cannabis than those who are less devout or non-believers, according to a new study conducted by Florida researchers. Cannabis consumption is up across nearly all demographic categories across the country, except for churchgoers.
“Our study confirms previous studies of recreational marijuana use,” said Amy Burdette, an associate professor of sociology at Florida State University. “However, I believe ours is the first to examine the association between religiosity and medical marijuana use.”
Burdette and her team’s findings were recently published in the Journal of Drug Issues. The study revealed that individuals who regularly attend church and report that religion is “very important in their daily decision making” are less likely to use marijuana recreationally and medically.
The study crunched the numbers from the 2016 National Survey on Drug Use and Health. Over the years, many other studies have examined on the connection between religion and drug use among adolescents, but Burdette says this is one of the first studies to focus on cannabis use among adults.
“We know various forms of substance use have increased among older adults as well, Burdette said. “So, we need to know what’s going on among people in their 30s, 40s and 50s in terms of their substance use.”
In the study, researchers examined three focal variables — religious salience, religious service attendance and self-rated health.
Levels of religious attendance ranged from never attending services to attending more than once a week. Researchers found with every level of increased attendance the odds of being a recreational marijuana user reduced by 13 percent. The study found the likelihood of recreational marijuana use decreased by 20 percent as religious salience levels increased.
One interesting caveat to the findings is that religious involvement was less effective in deterring marijuana use among sickly adults whether recreational or medically prescribed. So, when illness comes, even the devout believe you can’t “pray away” the pain. Cannabis is consumed more by religious patients.
“You have two big institutions coming against each other when you’re suffering and in poor health,” Burdette said. “You might have your pastor highly stigmatizing its use, saying ‘it’s bad, it’s a drug, you shouldn’t do this.’ While your doctor says, ‘try this, it could help your pain and suffering.’ ”
As religious identity fades in modern society, Burdette speculates that more and more people will seek help from a medical authority instead of a moral one.
Super Dickmann’s, a German candy company, was forced to apologize over an image they uploaded on their Facebook. In it, a chubby marshmallow covered in chocolate poses as Meghan Markle, wearing a wedding dress and a crown with a phrase on top that roughly translates into “A foam in white.” Just… Why?
The image was uploaded on May 19, in the midst of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry’s wedding.
Screenshot via Super Dickmann’s/Facebook/BBC
Super Dickmann’s is known for their marshmallow treats and while it might have been a good idea to take advantage of the royal wedding crowd, this poor exercise in Photoshop, aside from heavily leaning into Markle’s race, is really awful looking.
According to BBC News, the caption of the Facebook post said, “What are you looking at? Wouldn’t you want to be Meghan today?” Which is lame, and makes little sense.
The Sun reports that the post got called out immediately, with users claiming that the image was “racist shit,” and that it made people want to “set something on fire.” Super Dickmann’s took the post down soon after, explaining that the company put little thought on the campaign while also issuing a brief public apology.
A big pardon! The world of Super Dickmann is colorful and diverse and far from racist thoughts.”
Well thanks for that. Your marketing is still very bad.
When asked about Apple’s upcoming developer conference, Siri has been strongly hinting at a significant makeover. The AI has said that it’ll be getting a lot smarter, that it’ll have a brand new voice, and that it’ll also have an awesome new home.
While Siri used to be innovative when it first came out, it has been eclipsed by competitors who have much more complex software and equipment. Amazon’s Alexa and the Google Home have had great sales and critical reception, being capable of doing online shopping for you, playing music, and setting your alarms. Apple’s Home Pod has lagged behind. To make things worse, Siri is also also easily confused and much less intuitive than other voice assistants on the market.
Among the rumored changes that are coming, Mashable believes that Siri might get a male voice make-over, or at least the possibility of having a male voice as an option. Amazon’s Alexa has this option even though it’s much less popular than it’s default, which is used for marketing purposes. Google took things further than any other company by giving their AI John Legend’s voice. Literally.
Whatever Apple decides to do next, it’s time for the company to invest on their AI software if they wish to stay competitive on today’s technological landscape. According to Recode, voice enabled devices and services are one of the biggest investments and technologies of the future.
Exercise is good for you for tons of different reasons. It relieves stress, keeps our bones and muscles strong, and improves our cardiovascular health. But why exercise has a positive effect on our heart health has always been less clear.
A recent study conducted on mice concluded that exercise, particularly cardio, helped the animals regenerate over four times more heart tissue. The research published on Nature Communications studied these mice for over eight weeks, where healthy mice ran over 3 miles a day on a running wheel. The study also tested rodents who had suffered from heart attacks and concluded that if they exercised consistently they would still develop new heart tissue.
Why is this information important? Well, Popular Science reports that the adult heart has a very limited ability to regenerate heart cells and this has lead to tons of trouble in the past. Young adults can renew about 1 percent of their heart cells in a year, and the older we get, the more our hearts lose this capability. This is bad thing because studies prove that damage on heart cells, even in a small amount of them, can result in heart failure and disease.
If exercise manages to help our hearts create even a small amount of cells, the difference could be really important, saving lives and preventing heart attacks. Repetitive exercise has been proven to increase the heart’s size and it’s functioning, preventing heart failure, and helping those who suffered from heart attacks recover more easily.
Lake Worth residents in Florida received what you might kindly label an odd alert following a power outage. Though they were made aware of the power outage residents also received a far more alarming notice: Zombies.
“Power outage and zombie alert for Lake Worth and Terminus,” read the alert, potentially referencing “The Walking Dead.”
Lake Worth spokesman Ben Kerr told the Palm Beach Post that an investigation is under way, but that “no one was fired for it.” The city also determined that no former or current employees edited the message to include the false warning about the zombie invasion.
The alert was sent at 1:45 a.m. As more alerts and notifications are being sent to users in our smartphone era, more mishaps like these occur. Earlier this year Hawaii residents were sent an imminent ballistic missile warning in error. In addition, this February Palm Beach County residents also received a tsunami weather alert originally intended as a test not to be sent out.
We are looking into reports that the system mentioned zombies,” Kerr wrote on Lake Worth Live, a community Facebook page. “I want to reiterate that Lake Worth does not have any zombie activity currently and apologize for the system message.”
The cannabis industry has been filling the coffers of Denver’s city budget since legalization began in January 2014. The city collects nearly $45 million a year from marijuana, nearly doubling its revenue in just four years.
In the first three years of the “grand experiment,” the vast majority of the money was funneled to one-off projects such as paving roads. Nearly all of the state’s portion of cannabis tax revenue is earmarked for education. But now, Denver is beginning to spread the wealth around.
“As the cities and states have more experience in this situation, you’ll see them begin to leverage these dollars,” said Denver Mayor Michael Hancock.
According to a report on Denver TV station Fox31, a wide variety of much-needed city projects are about to get an infusion of revenue. The report revealed that funds will be used to replace aging irrigation systems and other infrastructure projects in dire need of repair.
One of the more interesting uses of the marijuana funding will help historic sites get a makeover. According to Fox31:
This year, for the first time, the Denver Parks and Recreation department is benefiting big. They are receiving four million dollars in funding.
“This is where they started to build out the benches for the seating that would eventually become the stadium of Red Rocks today,” Shannon Dennison, Cultural Resource Administrator with Denver Mountain Parks said.
The very men who built the iconic Red Rocks Amphitheatre lived in nearby barracks during the Great Depression.
“The Civilian Conservation Corps was based here. There were about 200 young men who were out of work in the country who came here,” Dennison said.
The Mount Morrison Civilian Conservation Core Camp was built in the 1930s thanks to federal funding. More than 80 years later, the camp will be revamped courtesy of $500,000 from Denver’s cannabis industry. “It’s really going to give us the ability to keep this place going for another hundred years,” Dennison said.
Here are some of the other infrastructure projects, according to Fox31’s report, that will receive marijuana funding:
$600,000 to fix the boardwalk at Sloan’s Lake.
$750,000 to fund a new irrigation system at Harvard Gulch North.
$400,000 thousand dollars to provide a facelift to the park Asbury and Tejon, located on the southern end of Denver.
$1.7 million dollars will fund the crumbling 1oo-year-old terracotta walls at Sullivan Gateway.
“No matter what your stance is on marijuana, those tax revenues are coming back to the Parks and Rec department to help us get projects done that would not have been done before,” Gilmore said.
In a move that solidified the actions of the Senate, the US House of Representatives approved a bill this week that would allow terminally ill patients to have access to experimental drugs not yet branded with FDA approval. The proposal, known as the “Right to Try Act,” is now on its way over to President Trump for a signature. He is expected to sign the bill without issue.
“We also believe that patients with terminal conditions should have access to experimental treatments that could potentially save their lives,” Trump said earlier this year during his 2018 State of the Union address. “It is time for the Congress to give these wonderful Americans the ‘right to try.’ ”
Although 40 states have right-to-try laws on the books, a change in federal code would allow terminally ill patients in states without those laws easier access to experimental medications. There would be no application process, nor would patients need to register on some pesky database. They would simply work with their doctor and a pharmaceutical company to obtain the drug. But there are some stipulations. The drug must be “investigational” and have cleared at least Phase 1 of clinical trials.
Marijuana fits the bill of an investigational drug. There have been a small group of studies conducted throughout the years seeking to nail down the therapeutic benefits of the plant –enough to qualify the herb under the Right to Try Act. Sadly, however, this means a person will need to be close to death before marijuana is technically legal for them to use at the federal level.
And, believe it or not, prospective Right-to-try patients will first need to fail with every approved treatment option before being given the green light to use medical marijuana. This is not as big of an issue in states with cannabis laws on the books than it is in areas of total prohibition.
As it stands, the FDA has the power to fast track experimental medications for terminally ill patients. But again, only after all approved treatment options have been exhausted.
The agency claims it approves nearly every application that crosses its path. Last year, it approved 1,831 of the 1,842 filed, according to the latest data.
“I’m in favor of pathways that allow patients with terminal disease to get access to products that might be in development,” FDA Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb said in a recent interview with CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta. “That’s why we have an expanded-access pathway.”
Interestingly, there is some opposition to right-to-try. Some say it will only give people false hope.
“The problem becomes that you have a lot of false hope as a terminal cancer patient. You want to cling to anything that’s going to sound like it’s an opportunity to live longer or have a better quality of life,” Michael Becker, a cancer patient, told NPR. “That hope can sometimes cover up the realities of some of the more sinister aspects of getting a drug, which are things go wrong. So I could take a drug that was purported to help me, and it may actually make my condition worse.
No question is off limits, and all questions will remain anonymous. This week’s topic: questions to ask yourself before you have sex with someone.
No, but really — how does a person have better sex or a better relationship? The Fresh Toast has enlisted Rachel Krantz, a sex writer and proud canna-enthusiast, to help readers out with some answers as its sex columnist. No question is off limits, and all questions will remain anonymous. Please send your sex and relationship inquiries to editor@thefreshtoast.com. Now, onto this week’s topic: questions to ask yourself before you have sex with someone.
Q: I saw your article a while back on questions you should ask someone before you have sex with them, and I try to follow the advice. I guess what I’m wondering is, are there any questions I should just be asking myself? Like, the other night I slept with someone I was feeling sort of ambivalent about, but it had gotten so far that I felt like I kind of owed him or something. I’m wondering if you have any tips for checking in with yourself in moments like this.
A: The situation you describe is so relatable, I think especially for women. Often, it can be difficult to separate what we actually want from our fears of seeming mean or “like a tease.” Here are some tips for questions you can ask yourself when you’re deciding in the moment whether to sleep with someone. (I am writing this as much to remind myself as I am for you — so please don’t be hard on yourself if you ever struggle with this.)
Do I Feel Comfortable Talking To This Person About Safe Sex?
In the article you referenced, I give a list of questions I think you should ask someone before you have sex with them, like when they’ve last been tested and whether they have any STDs. Take some time to review those, and in the moment you’re deciding, ask yourself not only whether you know the answers to these questions yet, but also whether you feel comfortable brining them up in the first place.
If you already had the conversation, do you trust their answers? Did you feel they were appreciative of your asking, or did they seem weirded-out and threatened? Someone worth sleeping with shouldn’t make you feel awkward about asking about their STI status or about safe sex practices. If they were cool about it and you felt very weird about asking anyway, it could also be a sign that there isn’t a lot of comfort for you in the dynamic yet, and you might be jumping the gun.
Will It Bother Me If I Find Out They Are Sleeping With Other People?
Another question I suggest you ask a potential partner is whether they are currently sleeping with anyone else. A question you can ask yourself, however, is whether you’d be OK with finding out they are sleeping with other people after you have sex.
If so, it’s important to communicate before you have sex what you would expect to know from them. Would you like to know about any new partners they have after you sleep together? Would you like to become monogamous after sleeping together? These are all important things to know going in, because once you have sex, things can get a lot more complicated.
Do I Trust This Person To Be Honest With Me?
If you were to ask the person to answer any sensitive questions about their health, sexual preferences, or how many partners they have, do you trust they are giving you the whole truth? Do you sense that they would keep telling you the whole truth? Trust your gut on this one. If you doubt their honesty, that’s a sign it might be too soon.
If We Sleep Together & They Ghost, Will I Regret This?
Unfortunately, this is always a possibility, because people are rude. Even if it seems highly unlikely, if this worst-case scenario were to happen, would you regret your decision to sleep with them? Or would you know that you were doing it because you really felt like having sex and it was a genuine expression of your own desires?
I find I only regret sexual actions when I feel like I wasn’t being true to myself in some way, or was acting for other people’s benefit instead of my own. Which brings me to…
Am I Doing This Because I’m Worried About Seeming Like “A Tease”?
This is such a hard dynamic to avoid — especially when you’re a woman raised to think you owe men something once you “let” things get beyond a certain point. Are you about to have penetrative sex only because he just went down on you for half an hour and you feel “bad,” even though you’re not really ready? Time to communicate that and put the brakes on things. I don’t care if you brought him into your room and he gave you an hour-long massage. You never owe anyone sex, and the idea of “being a tease” is really often just coded language for “being a woman who says no when she doesn’t want sex.” All you owe someone is your open communication and honesty.
If you’re having this dialogue in your head and are unsure how pressured you’re feeling, tell them! How they react will speak volumes about their character. (Just beware feeling like you “owe” someone a reward for good behavior if they are cool about not pressuring you.)
Am I Only Doing This Because I Need An Orgasm Right Now?
Sometimes we have sex before we’re ready just because we’ve been doing other stuff for a few hours, and we’re horny. If this sounds familiar, ask yourself this question in the moment. If you are just having sex because you want an orgasm but aren’t really ready emotionally (been there) is there another lower-risk activity you can suggest, like mutual masturbation? That way, there will be some closure and release to the night without your feeling like you’ve reached the point of no return by default.
Am I Doing This For Reasons That Are Kind To This Person And Myself?
Are you just having sex because you’re trying to get over an ex? To prove to yourself you’re desirable? Because this person seems hot but boring enough that you won’t catch feelings? Whatever the reasons may be, it’s important to check in with yourself that they are kind to both yourself and your potential partner. It’s totally OK if you’re about to have sex for less-than romantic reasons, so long as both people are on the same page and the attitude is one of mutual respect.
Do I Feel Safe, Respected, And Like I Want To Give Enthusiastic Consent?
This is probably the most important item. You should feel all of these things before you have sex, even if it’s casual. Do you want to give a clear and enthusiastic go-ahead, or are you allowing yourself to be swept up in someone else’s preferences? There’s nothing wrong with being a little submissive at heart, but you should be clear that what you’re about to do is what you actually want to be doing — not just something you’re doing to accommodate someone else. I repeat: you don’t owe anybody anything besides your honesty, kindness, and communication. Period.
